via:workflow

One reason is confusion over how enterprises define multi-cloud: Just over half of those polled defined it as including a combination of either public or private clouds along with on-premise infrastructure. (That is also a widely accepted definition of “hybrid clouds”.) Meanwhile, 23 percent of respondents said multi-cloud includes all three: public and private clouds along with their own datacenters.

Mirantis therefore thinks it can do a similar job for other combinations of open source software and that users will welcome such oft-updated bundles as anything that makes developers more productive, and infrastructure more secure, should be welcome.

Four years ago, in October 2013, 451 Research reported that OpenStack cloud revenues were approximately $600 million in 2013. In April 2016, 451 Research reported that 2015 OpenStack ecosystem revenues came in at $1.2 billion, with a forecast to grow to $3.37 billion by 2018.

Now in November 2017, 451 Research is out with it latest OpenStack market sizing report, estimating 2017 OpenStack ecosystem revenue at $2.6 billion. Looking forward, 451 Research is forecasting that OpenStack market revenues will reach $6.7 billion by 2021

Kevin Ichhpurani, executive vice president of global ecosystem and channels at GE Digital, and corporate officer of GE, told CRN during GE’s Minds and Machines conference in San Francisco last week that channel partners will have more success developing and selling applications around IoT, as opposed to grappling with the long and complex sales cycle of the GE Predix IoT platform itself.

According to Telstra, in some cases, its software development time has decreased from 6-8 months to 10-12 weeks through its work with Pivotal,

More on how widespread it is:

Telstra has moved 100 of its internal teams to Pivotal’s agile software development platform since partnering with the enterprise software company two years ago, with the telco saying this accounts for around 25 to 30 percent of its business.

Under the partnership, Telstra’s teams have been trained in Pivotal Labs to build software using agile methodologies on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, with an end goal of shifting 400 teams encompassing around 4,000 to 5,000 staff members to the cloud software-development platform.

This week, Big Blue rolled out its new IBM Cloud Private software platform that is designed to enable enterprises to develop on-premises private cloud environments to accelerate app development and allow for easier movement of workloads between their private clouds and public clouds – not only the IBM Cloud but also those from other vendors. Similarly, IBM is leaning on open and container-based technologies for enhanced integration and portability of workloads. The IBM Cloud Private platform is built on Kubernetes, an open-source technology for container orchestration, and will support both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry framework.

More:

IBM Cloud Private can run on a variety of infrastructures, including the vendor’s own mainframe and Power systems, its hyperconverged infrastructure that runs Nutanix software, and IBM Storage’s Spectrum Access solution. In addition, it can run on systems from Dell EMC, Lenovo, Cisco Systems and NetApp, and can be deployed by such VMware, Canonical and other OpenStack distributions as well as bare-metal systems. The private cloud platform also includes such developer services for data analytics as Db2, Db2 Warehouse, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, developer tools like Netcool, UrbanCode, and Cloud Brokerage and open-source management software such as Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, and ElasticSearch.

Part of the problem, according to the General Services Administration’s Bill Zielinski, is that many agencies still try to scope out modernization projects with highly specific technical requirements. “We define not only the business outcome that we’re trying to achieve,” Zielinski said at the FCW-hosted IT modernization event, “but we have that tendency to say, ‘and this is explicitly how you’re going to do that.'”
Such specific solicitations tend to produce near-identical proposals from industry, he noted, which forces agencies to select based on “lowest price technically acceptable” criteria. Worse, he said, that prescriptive approach denies agencies the opportunity to benefit from new and creative solutions that might surface if they simply described the business capability that’s needed.

The cloud initiative combines Google’s de facto standard Kubernetes cluster orchestration platform for managing applications and services across hybrid infrastructure with Cisco’s networking and security expertise. It also leverages Cisco’s push into hyper-converged infrastructure. Along with extending security to application containers and other micro-services, the deal would allow users to monitor application behavior running on hybrid platforms, the partners said.

The other pillar of the collaboration is Istio, another open source tool released earlier this year to help manage micro-services via what developers call a “service mesh network.” Working with Kubernetes, Istio aims to provide a uniform means of connecting and managing micro-services.

“The company builds its apps in Docker containers. Apps that need to stay on the company’s premises run on an OpenStack private cloud. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are used for public cloud. Fidelity uses a combination of cloud-native management tools like CloudFormation for AWS, Heat templates for OpenStack, and Terraforms, which runs across both public and private environments. It uses Cloud Foundry as a PaaS layer that spans both public and private clouds, too.”

“One of the problems that we’ve got — it’s not the problem but it’s a problem — you develop a piece of technology, we don’t have the resourcing flexibility to buy it.”

That means the Army is forced to buy a technology available today it thinks it will need in 2025, when what it truly needs hasn’t been developed yet.

“[Say] you came up with something new that I really need on the battlefield based on a threat, I have no ability to integrate that into my platform. So whether it’s buy, try, decide or adapt and buy, this allows us to test technology, put it in a demonstrative, experimental environment .… Maybe I want to give it to this unit that’s going to this particular place and get feedback, and then I iterate the whole Army.”